Real Talk: Lip Syncing Is Not a Skill

Over the weekend, Aaron Rodgers and Olivia Munn used Dubsmash to lip sync a few lines of Mariah Carey's "Hero," which they then posted to Instagram, and now it's trending nationwide, just days after Lip Sync Battle aired the finale of a blockbuster first season that gave Spike some of the biggest ratings in its history. You've got Lip Sync Fever, America!

Because here's the thing: lip syncing isn't anything. When you are mouthing the words to a song—even if you put on a special outfit for it, even if that outfit includes a feather boa—you are not actually adding anything to it. You are just following along. You are aggressively acknowledging that a thing exists. You are taking valuable time in your one life on this planet to say to the world: "I am hearing the same song that you are hearing, and I know the words." Great! We are happy for you! But we know the words, too. Go do something else.

Lip Sync Battle was spun off from one of the dozens of Jimmy Fallon segments where celebrities break their fucking necks to show you how relatable they are. It is a show that is meant to be passed around on the internet, like every other show on television. It is a great big waste of time, never more so than when they invite actual singers onto it—like John Legend and Mary J. Blige—and tell them: "Welcome to our show, now please don't make any noise with your mouths." Lip Sync Battle is popular culture running out the clock.

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Spike TV

Dubsmash takes lip sync mania directly to the people by allowing you to follow along to a few seconds of your favorite song, and then send it to your friends, the way a small child might do when bored. It also takes the whole thing a step further by allowing the user to lip sync movie and television scenes. So, for example, Hugh Jackman can say a few words from "Die Hard" and send it to his followers, and then…well, then, really nothing else happens, except tens of thousands of people like it and share it and it gets put onto a list of "Most Outrageous Celebrity Dubsmash Videos" and Hugh Jackman gets to look like a regular guy who knows how to have a good time when you know perfectly well he ran it all past his publicist. We get to sit around our computers while a millionaire pretends to say a number that a different millionaire said in a movie a long time ago. No, America. We are better than this.

(I have seen one celebrity movie-dialogue Dubsmash that seems to have been made for a purpose, and it is this one of Dane Cook moving his lips to a line from "Mean Girls," and it exists to slyly inform Dane Cook's fan base that he is not one of those guys who skips leg day. This is a Kardashian butt selfie dressed as a Dubsmash. I'm not mad at it.)

When you sign up for Dubsmash, which I sort of started to do as research before wising up and throwing my phone across the room, here is the example it uses for this functionality:

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Just in case your #squad wants to MLK it up over mimosas next weekend. #sundayfunday #racismNO

Lip Sync Battle and Dubsmash are popular because celebrities do them, and celebrities do them because they view them as opportunities to let their hair down, as though our culture were forcing them to act like prim little Frasiers and Liliths all day long. As though their only options were silence or a summer-stock production of 'Night, Mother. We are living in a time of Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine. Each week, there is a buzzy, youthful new awards ceremony, at which celebrities can debut kicky new red-carpet looks. I can rank Taylor Swift's 20 besties, and tell you who's rising and who's falling, without ever having so much as pondered the subject quietly. Right now, towering over Sunset Boulevard, a billboard for the Video Music Awards features the massive, threateningly-euphoric head of Miley Cyrus, out of whose eyes are shooting actual literal melted ice cream sprinkles. Celebrities, it would be okay if you put your hair back up once in a while.

Back in the '80s, there was a syndicated show called Puttin' On The Hits, in which a lobotomized host allowed a bunch of weirdos to lip-sync and dance to the top songs of the day. It was the worst. Here's a clip from it.

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That's you, Oscar winner Anne Hathaway. That's how you look, respected news personality Willie Geist. Haven't you already been Stacy, Debbie and Stacy from Massapequa, Long Island, on your way up the ladder? Wasn't the whole point of becoming a celebrity so that you wouldn't have to keep mugging for approval like them? Can't you just relax and be better than us for five minutes? If you keep trying to seem approachable, sooner or later people will actually approach you, and I am reasonably certain that's a thing you don't want.

When you post and/or share lip sync videos, what you are telling the world is This is how I choose to be entertained. I don't want to see or hear anything new; I want to recite what I already know, or better still have one of the Pretty Little Liars do it for me. You are rejecting actual substance. You are paving the road on which Donald Trump is driving a bright red Hummer directly to the White House. You are standing athwart history and saying nothing.

Unless you are in the bottom two on RuPaul's Drag Race—a show that is exactly four oh no she betta don'ts away from an intervention of its own—your life does not depend on lip syncing. Nothing depends on lip syncing. Stop it with the lip syncing. Go make something.